Tahitian Landscape

1891

Paul Gauguin went to Tahiti in 1891 in search of new, exotic motifs, but also to escape European civilization, which he felt was artificial and spiritually bankrupt. This picture, one of the first he painted in the South Seas, exhibits the artist's characteristic Post-Impressionist style. In it, Gauguin used sinuous contours and intense colors to express the joy and serenity inspired by the lush tropical site.Tahiti would become Gauguin's home for most of the last twelve years of his life. He once said of his Tahitian paintings that he had been "eager to suggest a luxurious and untamed nature, a tropical sun that sets aglow everything around it...the equivalent of the grandeur, depth, and mystery of Tahiti when it must be expressed in one square meter of canvas."

Les Fauves is the title of an important loan exhibition which members will be invited to enjoy at a special preview on Wednesday evening, January 21. Organized by the Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Art Gallery of Toronto, this exhibition will bring to Minneapolis the most extensive group of Fauvist art yet seen here. Les Fauves, literally meaning the wild beasts, were a group of French artists who, fifty years ago, launched the first avant-garde movement of the twentieth century. Their paintings are distinguished by the use of very high colors, mostly yellows, reds, greens, and blues, which were applied with slashing freedom, and sometimes with a view to distortion, to achieve the maximum emotional impact upon the spectator. A number of well-known painters, all of whom are still living, participated in the movement, contributing in varying degrees to the development of modern painting. The exhibition includes outstanding examples of all of these men—Matisse, Vlaminck, Derain, Braque, Rouault, and Dufy.Like the term Impressionists, the name of the Fauves was coined by a journalist, Louis Vauxcelles, who first saw paintings by members of the group at the Salon d'Automne of 1905. Captivated by an academic piece of sculpture in the Renaissance style, which he found sharing a gallery with works by Matisse and his friends, Vauxcelles exclaimed: “Donatello au milieu des fauves!” The name stuck, for it described, more or less appropriately, the daring creations submitted to the exhibition by this group of artists. The remark made by Vauxcelles proved mild by comparison with the hostile opinions of other critics. All failed to perceive that the style created by the Fauves was but the logical sequel to the innovations of Van Gogh and Gauguin. Although the work of the Impressionists was by this time accepted, that of the Post-Impressionists, to whom the Fauves were especially indebted, was not yet popular. Recognition of the great contribution made by Van Gogh and Gauguin was not to come until the Fauves had made their own flamboyant entrance into the limelight. And it is tempting to think that recognition may have had its inception at the first large exhibition of paintings by Van Gogh, held in Paris four years earlier, when Derain first introduced Vlaminck to Matisse. All three, and especially Vlaminck, who did not share the other enthusiasms of Matisse and Derain, were struck by what they saw. It was under a series of such circumstances that various members of the group met each other and discovered their mutual interests. They did not establish a formal organization or issue a manifesto of any kind. They merely met occasionally to paint together and to exchange ideas.Today it is very difficult to understand the furore which their paintings provoked prior to 1910, when most of the group exhibited together. Although members of the Art Institute may know little about some of the painters in the group outside of Matisse, Vlaminck, and Derain, they will be charmed and stimulated by what they see in the exhibition. They will, moreover, become aware of a sense of familiarity with these works even if specific examples are not known to them. Unwittingly, and for a number of reasons, they have become accustomed to such painting. First of all, Van Gogh and Gauguin have become household words. Their paintings, familiar through exhibitions and extensive reproduction, contain the essence of the innovations of the Fauves. In addition, the ideas developed by Matisse and his friends have already been encountered by a wide public in the writings of Van Gogh and Gauguin, where they are freely and fully discussed. Furthermore, everyone is now used to color in everyday life; it is used, in many cases, for violent color, such as that to be seen in advertisements and printing, neon signs and technicolor films. The heightened color in Fauvist paintings is therefore no longer wholly shocking.The men comprising the group called the Fauves came from many parts of France and from other European countries. They also came from widely different backgrounds in regard to education and training. They found a bond, however, in their point of departure, the work of Van Gogh and Gauguin which is so admirably illustrated in the Institute's permanent collection. They also found a bond in their approach to painting, in their interest in the emotional or psychological possibilities of color, and in the freedom with which they applied pigment. Their experiment was not a self-conscious or an intellectual thing, but a combination of intuition and personal observation based on the most recent tradition of creative painting. They did not distort for the sake of distortion, but to achieve a more dramatic means of expression. Their purpose was the creation of unusual harmonies within their distortion, for they considered a balance between subject and an appropriate intensity of color the final goal. Dramatizing life and nature, as they saw them, with blazing color and bold strokes, the Fauves launched a new movement which, despite the hostility of critics spread like wildfire. Before long, an audacious woman named Berthe Weill was selling their works in quantity at her gallery on Montmartre.On first impression, almost any exhibition of work by the Fauves seems violent. However, the violence is due, more or less, to the combined force of the group; the work of no single master, if individually analyzed, will prove too shocking. Although it may seem like a paradox, each of the Fauves sought to achieve harmony in terms of distortion, heightening their colors to a degree of intensity that was in itself a ripe and exotic harmony. In this instance they were guided by their progenitor, Gauguin, who pointed out that “In nature, all tones, even the most garish, fuse in invariable harmony.” This is as true of Gauguin's Tahitian Landscape in the Institute's collection as it is of the unbelievably beautiful series of views of London by Derain. The paintings by both the older and the younger master continue to offer us the freshest impression of places newly discovered. Just as the stroke and impasto selected by Van Gogh in his Olive Trees, from the Institute's collection, seem appropriate, so they do in Vlaminck's Gardens in Chatou. It is significant that although the Fauves were willful in their use of distortion, they were also purposeful in molding it to their ends. While they sought to awaken the public to the drama of life around them, they achieved their goal by perfectly legitimate means. As the movement spread, it swept with it both major and minor painters. In the first group were men who have changed the course of twentieth-century art; in the second were men who produced a few masterpieces at the time but were unable to sustain their early originality in later works. None have continued to paint in the style which they created, although the best have built upon their initial and successful experiments. The movement was like an epidemic, with the germ coming from Van Gogh, Gauguin, and the great Norwegian, Munch. The contagion spread among the Fauves themselves, and, like an epidemic, died out in the course of time. Its death was due not to a change in public taste, but to the painters themselves, who realized that they had said all they could say though their chosen medium of color. Most of them were young enough to be interested in other directions, and they deliberately withdrew from the movement to explore the new roads which they had opened for themselves as well as for the public.One of the most astounding facts about them was that their approach never became a manner or a method. It was not an academic or intellectual movement. Each went his individual way, developing according to his personal taste and talents.The most important of the Fauves, Matisse, went on to triumphs of more mature and personal style, building on color for originality and decorative effect. Promise of his ability can be detected in his earliest works, such as Open Window, Collioure. The climax of his activity with the other Fauves can be seen in the magnificent Boy with a Butterfly Net, the major painting by the master in the exhibition. Vlaminck and Derain discarded their imaginative use of primary colors to join Picasso in his experiments in Cubism. In turn they discarded Cubism for tradition, and they have never again attained the dazzling results seen in their earliest works in this exhibition. Braque also joined Picasso in the development of Cubism, contributing the bold but harmonious use of color he had personally developed.Dufy, seen at his best in the Fourteenth of July, built a frankly decorative art on the foundation laid by the Fauves. His lesser contemporaries, Van Dongen among them, eventually succumbed to modish illustration and portrait painting.The significance of Fauvism as one of the three or four major movements of the twentieth century cannot be overestimated. First of all, the group produced three giants of modern painting: Matisse, Braque, and Rouault, and at least three other painters who have established lasting reputations: Vlaminck, Derain, and Dufy. Second, the movement represents the century's first revolution in paintings, and, at the same time, the most important link with the past, stemming as it did from the Post-Impressionists. Third, the short-lived movement produced some very far-reaching effects, contributing to the development of color in both abstract and Expressionist painting. Even some of the most advanced painting of today owes a debt to this movement, which forms a bridge between the final innovations of the nineteenth century and the multitudinous trends of the twentieth.The exhibition of Les Fauves represents one of the most important assemblages of work by this group ever shown, for it presents every important cross-current in the painting of the time and contains not only an impressive group of first-rate paintings by such artists as Vlaminck and Derain as yet little exhibited in this country, but a stunning group of works by unfamiliar members of the Fauves.Referenced Works of Art

Sergeant of the Colonial Regiment. Albert Marquet. Lent by Robert Lehman, New York.

It is with pleasure that the Institute announces this week to events of importance to all interested in the work and life of Paul Gauguin. The first is the purchase of one of his great canvases, Tahitian Landscape, and the second the opening of a loan exhibition entitled Gauguin in Tahiti, organized to provide a background for the newly acquired painting. A generous bequest made this acquisition possible. The will of Deborah B. Eliel provided a fund for the purchase of a single work of art as a memorial to her husband, Julius C. Eliel. Although this bequest was made some years ago, the conditions attached to it could not be fully complied with until recently.Tahitian Landscape dates from Gauguin’s first trip to Tahiti, 1891-1893, the period during which he produced the majority of his masterpieces, and stands as a symbol of his new-found life and happiness in the South Seas. As one of the first works that he undertook in Tahiti, it is a key to the understanding of his highly personal style. This addition to the Institute’s growing group of nineteenth-century paintings may well be familiar to many museum visitors through frequent reproduction. Tahitian Landscape was formerly in The Frick Collection in New York. Prior to that, it belonged to Mrs. Chester Beatty of London and to the famous art dealer, Ambroise Vollard of Paris, who, in all probability, purchased it from Gauguin himself when he returned to France.The chief events of Gauguin’s life are too well known and have been popularized too often to require more than the briefest review. His contemporaries were preoccupied with scientific investigation in every field. The inquiring spirit of the age is reflected in Gauguin’s personality, in his continual search for new horizons not only in his painting, but in his private life as well. His Peruvian ancestry and youthful trips to South America with his family and later with the French navy may account for his mania for change and stimulation.In 1873, he married and commenced a flourishing career as a stockbroker in Paris. Ten years later he abruptly abandoned this, deserting his business and, for all practical purposes, his family, to devote the rest of his life to painting. He had previously become a Sunday painter and as an amateur had exhibited five times with the Impressionists. In 1886 he joined members of that movement in Brittany for a few months for instruction. However, the most decisive factor in his development was a trip to Martinique in 1887, after which he was determined to seek a tropical Utopia where he could paint in peace. The trip to Martinique further convinced him that he could achieve any desired emotional effect in his painting through intensifying his use of color. The idea was not new, but was given new impetus and meaning by Gauguin. After a stormy visit to Van Gogh in Arles in 1888, he returned to Brittany, spending two years at Pont Aven. His friends there called themselves the Symbolists, and based their art on a careful and symbolic selection of subject matter and color.Gauguin finally secured enough funds through the sale of his personal collection and some of his own works to depart for Tahiti in 1891. This first sojourn lasted for two years. The change greatly stimulated him, and he undertook a prodigious amount of work. However, he soon fell ill, and suffered from countless disappointments. He returned to France in 1893 for two years. At the end of that time, as convinced as ever that he would find his Utopia in the South Seas, he again sailed for Tahiti. After six years there, he moved to the Marquesas in 1901, where he died in 1903. His writing tell us much of his romantic and tragic life in exile, but it is his paintings, less self-conscious and more reliable than his writings, that reveal the real man and his contribution to the art of painting.Upon his arrival in Tahiti, Gauguin settled in the town of Papeete, where he found little of inspiration and, among the colonial inhabitants, much that was too reminiscent of European life. Disappointed, he moved to the village of Mataieu, where he found his new surroundings completely exhilarating. It was doubtless here, in 1891, that he commenced painting Tahitian Landscape. His letters of that year are full of descriptions of the scenery near his native hut. He noticed contrasts everywhere. He mentioned that on one side he saw deeply fissured mountains, palms, and mangoes forming arabesques with woods hanging over dark waters, and, on the other, a magnificent stretch of beach and sea beyond. Temporarily, at least, Gauguin found the peace for which he had been searching. At that time he wrote to his friend, Charles Morice, “I escaped from the false and have entered into nature confident that tomorrow will be as free and lovely as today. Peace wells up in me.” In the Institute’s new painting we see tangible evidence of the painter’s joy in his tropical surroundings.Tahitian Landscape is symbolic of the serenity that Gauguin found in Tahiti. In it we see no trace of the disillusionment that he was soon to experience. This landscape is exceptionally objective for Gauguin. Nevertheless, it is as dramatic as any of his more subjective paintings. It is rare in the sense that it is one of the painter’s few pure landscapes, for Gauguin has introduced only a single figure and a dog as secondary accents. Some portions of the landscape appear again in his later paintings, as contrasting background, but always subordinate to his concentration on the human figure.In style, Tahitian Landscape is closely related to the landscapes that Gauguin painted in Brittany and is more naturalistic that Gauguin’s later works. He chose as his point of departure Impressionism, employing the evanescent effects that Pissarro had perfected and the paralleled hatchings of color that Cézanne had developed. His selection of color for its emotional effect was part of the Symbolist doctrine. However, Gauguin went one step beyond any previous effort and here intensified his color to heighten the beauty that he saw around him.Gauguin has conceived this landscape as a series of flat planes, superimposed rhythmically, one upon the other, and differentiated by color contrasts; green, pink, and heliotrope. As in some of his earlier works, he has abandoned conventional perspective without sacrificing the illusion of three-dimensional space. Gauguin’s rich use of color and masterly composition communicate his highly personal feelings to the spectator.The exhibition Gauguin in Tahiti, organized to feature the new painting, provides the museum visitor with an opportunity to trace Gauguin’s development from the year in which he painted it, 1891, to 1903. In addition to Tahitian Landscape, the Institute’s other canvas, I Raro Te Oviri (Under the Pandanus), has, of course, been included. It provides an interesting contrast to Tahitian Landscape. In it, Gauguin has treated the background of the sea breaking on the coral reef in much the same manner in which he handled his color in Tahitian Landscape. However, he has concentrated, in Under the Pandanus, on the native figures that he has used as symbols of the basic life he found in Tahiti and that he has worked into a magnificent arabesque.The Sulking Woman which the Worcester Art Museum has generously lent to the exhibition brings out another striking contrast to Tahitian Landscape. This is primarily a figure painting. Gauguin has focused attention on the main actor in this little drama by placing her solidly in the center of the composition and creating a figure as solid as an abstraction in marble. Here the color areas are flatter.Gauguin’s first years, after his return to Tahiti, were not as productive as 1891 and 1892. Paintings of this period are scarcer, and, if anything, over-sentimental. But his move to the island of Santo Domingo in the Marquesas in 1901 stimulated him to a final outburst of brilliant production. The Cleveland Museum of Art has lent us the outstanding example of Gauguin’s painting of this period. This canvas, The Call, painted in 1902, is reminiscent of the Institute’s new landscape and exemplifies the same handling of color and contrasting planes to denote space. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has lent an important work, Three Women and a White Horse, completed shortly before Gauguin’s death. In it, Gauguin reiterates the bold experiments that he included in Tahitian Landscape.The obvious appeal of Gauguin’s subject matter and the romantic aspects of his life have clouded the chief significance of his contribution to painting. However, the objective spectator will study Gauguin’s paintings and understand why René Huyghe, the Director of the Louvre, has called him “the creator of modern painting.” Comparisons with the work of the Fauves, the Cubists, and the Expressionists point out, better than words, Gauguin’s tremendous influence on the twentieth century. The use of abstract pattern and of color for its emotional effect are usually considered Gauguin’s chief contributions, but perhaps more influential than either has been Gauguin’s spirit of experimentation, which his friend Daniel de Monfried described as “the right to dare anything.” Gauguin, through such masterpieces as the Institute’s Tahitian Landscape and I Raro Te Oviri (Under the Pandanus), has shown the painters of our own time the extent to which they can go. Gauguin understood his own position as a painter and wrote with justification at the end of his life that “the painters who reap benefits of this liberty today owe me something.”Referenced Works of Art